Incorporating Temporal Information in Microblog Retrieval

Microblog retrieval is the task of retrieving relevant tweets in response a query. This paper presents our methods and results for the Real-time Ad-hoc Task in the TREC Microblog Track 2012. Our experiments focused on different ways of using temporal information to improve retrieval. Our four runs include three methods that use temporal information and a baseline method that does not. One of our temporal methods favors recent tweets and the other two favor tweets from time periods associated with a high concentration of tweets predicted relevant (potentially, but not necessarily the recent past).